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"I see our little hunter boy has woken up from his slumber. Welcome to your new home, sleeping beauty."

-

It was well past midnight, the full moon hanging high above in the night sky, but the school year had ended in at St. Genevieve's Academy since last week and for the time being they did not need to worry about curfews. Not that his parents would have minded him being out so late anyway. They were currently out doing the exact same thing in other parts of the country or somewhere in the world. It was always hard to tell where they would be. One day they could be in Guadalajara, Mexico. While the next they could be in Seoul, South Korea.

Their family was special, different than most other families that they knew with talents that had either been given to them by the gods in Canada or the Aztec gods in Mexico. Like oil and water, fire and ice. Opposites, but also very much alike. And yet both species were sworn enemies to each other. Diego--who more commonly went by Dio ever since his younger brothers baptized him with the nickname as a kid--always knew that he would one day inherit the family business, being the eldest of five siblings, and therefore had to get involved in it as much as possible. That involved spending odd hours of the night hunting, as they liked to call it. And before that, he had trained in a place called the Garden for two years, away from his family and under the strict training of his grandfather Arthur Vega.

On this particular night, he had been sent out with his two younger brothers, the twins Giorno and Hiram. His youngest siblings, his sisters Narda and Liesl, were back home with a baby sitter. Narda was fourteen and already aching to join the family business. But their mother Harley had put it as her one condition that upon turning fifteen, each of her children could decide if they wanted to be hunters. The youngest of them, Liesl, was only twelve and still had a few years before she could go out and hunt with her siblings.

When it came to the boys though, all three were old enough to hunt by now. Diego was seventeen, a senior in high school, while the twins were sixteen and third years at St. Genevieve's. The three brothers were there to hunt down a dangerous group of shifters who were now murdering humans all over Sydney for a reason no one could determine other than it being for sport. The epidemic was getting worse by each passing day and the local police had asked Arthur Vega and his family of hunters to step in and get to the bottom of it. This is where the patriarch of the family regretted not having killed Hazel and Jack Quimby when he had the chance all those years ago. But Diego could not think of something so horrible. He could not even stomach the thought.

He couldn't imagine his uncle Michael without his aunt Hazel. She made him so happy and he absolutely adored her. And without her, he wouldn't have his cousins Daisy and Kristiane. They were Arthur's grandchildren as well and he loved them dearly. But he also thought that he would have avoided himself and the world so many problems if he had just killed the last two remaining originals when he had the chance. That would have rendered the shifters powerless and the hunters would be the only ones with super human abilities. But, as anything would have it, there had to be a balance in all things in nature. Getting rid of the shifters meant they had to get rid of the hunters as well. So it was instead decided that they would try to co-exist. Hazel and her brother Jack would rule as monarchs of the shifters. Their kingdom of ice. While Harley and Michael would be the ruling monarchs of the hunters, a kingdom of fire.

Diego and Giorno were scouting the perimeter of the abandoned building where the shifters were supposed to be gathered that night. It was an old warehouse that used to make furniture back in the 60s in the outskirts of the city, a place that no one paid attention to. Even after about forty years, it was still left empty. Each time the place was to be used for something useful, something always happened to stop that from happening. It was like the place was cursed. And the people of the Firestone suburb of Sydney definitely thought so anyway. Why else would a place like that be empty for so long?

Hiram remained in the car, several feet away keeping a vigilant eye on everything. He was the one responsible for letting his brothers know if there was any danger approaching them and he was in charge of keeping the getaway car running. The hunters were dressed in black from head to toe with their signature leather jackets, to help them blend into the darkness of the night, their shiny silver Diamond Rose hidden away beneath the waist band of their jeans, a long chain keeping the gun attached to their belt loop lest it were to fall out.

The plan was a sound proof one. The boys would block all the exits with ground chrysanthemum plants to keep them from being able to escape and move in, Giorno from one side and Diego from the other. That would ensure that the shifters would be unable to at least not without them ending up badly burned and weak. Each of them had a bullet belt slung across their torso, and had been trained to reload their guns within seconds. The faster they did it, the more shifters they could accomplish to kill.

After scouting the area and quietly taking out the guards at the doors, as well as blocking the entrance and dousing it with the chrysanthemum powder, Diego was going to meet up with his younger brother to start the attack.

As he approached the area where they first agreed to meet up, he stopped in his tracks upon realizing that his younger brother was not alone. He was at the moment being detained by two shifters who appeared to be rabid--eyes red and lips curled back into a snarl. One of them had taken Giorno's Diamond Rose, and Diego could see the indignation on his sixteen year old brother's face at the thought of another person touching something so sacred to them. A beautiful silver gun with his name engraved on the side, a present from their grandfather when they turned fifteen. One of the shifters observed the gun and stuffed it beneath the waist band of his jeans carelessly as though it were just any old thing.

Diego hid behind the corner of the building, not having yet been seen by the three of them.

He stepped back out, into their sight like a flash, gun in hand and ready to shoot. He pulled the trigger once, hitting the shifter on the right. As the bullet hit him, he instantly turned into a pile of ashes on the ground, disappearing before them. Before he could shoot the other one, he pushed Giorno forward and made a run for it. But instead of looking relieved, Giorno had a look of horror on his face.

"Dio..." He started, clearly looking at something or someone behind his brother.

Before Diego could turn around, he felt something hard collide with the back of his head, and suddenly his world went black.

-

When he woke up next, he was locked up in a room which was about ten feet by ten and he wasn't sure how much time had gone by. There was a mangy old bed with a thin spring mattress and a foil blanket taken from an emergency preparedness kit. On the other far corner of the room was a metal toilet that appeared to not have been cleaned in years and he gathered from his surroundings that he was in the warehouse. And one of the old offices had been arranged to become something of a cell for prisoners. He didn't even try to go for the door, as he guessed it was probably locked from the outside.

It was cold inside that room. The walls were a dark gray and the floor was made of cement. Everything about it felt cold and unsanitary. But he wondered how long he had been there. He wondered where his brother Giorno was.

Had he gotten away safely?

And why were the shifters keeping him alive when it could have been all the more easy to just kill him? Perhaps they were strategizing. Perhaps they were planning on using him as a bargaining tool. They likely knew that he was part of the Vega family, the famous family of hunters who were basically the police force of the supernatural. They probably knew his grandfather was Arthur Vega, his mother Harley Quinn and they probably wanted their revenge.

It likely wasn't going to be easy for him from there on out.

As he picked himself up from off the floor--they hadn't even had the decency to set him down on the bed--he walked over to the door, where there was a small glass window to look through, like the ones there were on the doors at school. He could see out into the hallway, but it was empty. His hand reached for the door knob only to pull back once he heard a sizzling sound and felt an infernal burning on his skin. That had to be the effects of chrysanthemum. But that meant he didn't have his repellant necklace on him, given to him on the day of his baptism by his parents to protect him from the harmful plant.

He went back to the bed and sat on it, the springs creaking slightly under his weight. The seventeen year old sat there and waited for what felt like an eternity until he heard a key insert into the lock from the outside and the door knob turned, signalling that someone was to come into the room. Diego kept his head down, but his ears attentive to everything that was happening as the door creaked open.

There was a tray of food that could best be described as mush, dropped onto the floor and pushed with the jailers food until it slid to Dio's feet. Dio lifted his eyes and looked the person from their feet up to their face, only to be met with a pair of beautiful and hate filled icy blue eyes. A smirk adorned her pretty face as she spoke to him tauntingly. "I see our little hunter boy has woken up from his slumber. Welcome to your new home, sleeping beauty."

Dio found himself giving her a threat through gritted teeth, his hands balling up into fists in anger. She was beautiful, and he wanted so badly to hurt her and make his escape. But he knew he had to be smarter about things if he wanted to survive and make it back to his family. For now he would have to rely on his words. "Where am I? What happened to my brother Giorno?"

Tapping her chin with her index finger and pretending to think about it, she first started by pretending to play dumb. "Oh you mean that really cute boy with auburn hair and blue eyes, that kind of looked like you, but with opposite features?" She knew exactly who she was talking about. The twins had auburn hair and blue eyes. They looked more like his grandmother Harleen's side of the family. Diego had brown hair and brown eyes, and his mother often said to him how he was the living copy of her grandfather Bobby Vega. His sisters Narda and Liesl looked a little more like their dad. When Dio said nothing, she continued. "I shot him, so he's most likely dead by now."

This filled the seventeen year old with even more rage, and even pain at what he was hearing. He could already feel the tears beginning to sting at his eyes, but he willed them away. He would not let someone like her see him cry. He still had his pride and his dignity to hold on to if he had nothing else. "When my family finds you, you're gonna regret what you're doing. My grandfather is Arthur Vega and my mother is Harley Quinn, descendants of the original hunters of Mexico. My aunt Hazel Quimby is descendant of the original shifters in Canada. Whichever way you see it, you're fucked if you think you'll get away with this."

The blue eyed girl laughed in his face, making him angrier than he already was. As he fully looked up, he saw that she was wearing both his leather jacket with hunter's logo patch on the sleeve and his chrysanthemum repelling necklace. Stuffed beneath the waist band of her jeans gleamed the cool silver of his Diamond Rose gun. She had not only stripped him of his weapons and protection, but also his identity and she knew it. She was doing it to mock him. "You think we answer to that hunter-lover of an aunt of yours? She married one of your kind. She is nothing to us, and neither is your family of hunters. My people answer to me. I am their queen."

So she was no ordinary shifter. She was their leader. Or as she was self-appointing herself, their queen.

"Who are you?" He asked her, not even sure if she was going to reply to him.

But she didn't see the harm in it. He was her prisoner after all, and she had plans for him. Those plans included not letting him leave that warehouse alive. Ultimately, it didn't matter to her if he knew her name or not.

"My name is Xenia Vidal."

-

so yes, the last chapter of this story and this series is the first chapter of the new series. reduce. reuse. recycle. ;)

but also because i wanted it all to tie into the new series. like this is ending, but our characters will still be present in the new series as adults and their kids as the teenagers. also, i used the jjba manga as my example. instead of having the same hero throughout all volumes of the manga, the artist has divided the series into eight parts so far. and each part has a new main character, who is a descendant of the original main character. 

so it starts off with jonathan in the 1800s. then there's joseph (jonathan's grandson) in the 1930s, jotaro (joseph's grandson) in the 1970s, josuke (joseph's illegitimate son) in 1999, and part five culminates in the early 2000s with giorno. then they get into a bunch of twisty shit like an alternate universe and a universe reset.

but that's another story. i'm not going to have as many parts to this series. i think after this second series i'll be done with the mitm universe. but i thank each and every person who has ever read this series. it means the entire world to me. 

-clary